This in turn means that the fun and sheer sense of contest is very much gone from the game. The maps are more and more complex and the vast majority are too big for the type of intense conflict I used to love in COD4. Multiplayer I had limited exposure to, but I found it perfectly okay for a quick game here and there – but noticeably never felt the passion or addiction I once did. Squads seems like a massive waste of time (if you want to play against 5 bots and a human, why not just play against 6 bots offline?). More annoying though is survival it was so great in MW3 but here I just couldn't get into it despite my efforts. On the other game modes, the aliens one didn't inspire me. Technically it looks good, but the music doesn't add as much, and the gameplay choices (and lack of choices) are poor – even for those who love the campaigns in the other games, this just comes over like going through the motions. This is not down to a fan-boy complaint (my days of buying this game on even year 1, far less day 1, are long gone) but just a simple observation: in terms of gameplay and narrative, it really feels nobody had the energy for this.
Indeed at one point I Googled to see how many missions the game had, just so I knew if I could face pushing on through them – seeing I only had 2 left, I preserved. With the other games there are several levels that I can always return to for how much fun they are to play, but with Ghosts I do not think there is one that I felt this way. Instead we get a tired and surprisingly bored story rolled out over missions which rarely excite or thrill. As a narrative the tight focus on a family in the midst of such a conflict might have worked, but really it doesn't. Ghosts tries to open on this, but just comes over silly and immediately making the player feel like they are on rails (which we are for the whole game – but the game doesn't need to always be reminding us of this). I was never one to jump into multiplayer on day one, I always enjoyed the Michael Bay style action and OTT spectacle of the campaigns. With Ghosts I was one of the rare breed buying it for the campaign. With MW3, I enjoyed the spectacle of the single player, and the fun of survival, but barely put 24 hours into the multiple player before getting bored – a big contrast compared to the days when COD4 was the only game I owned, and clocked a shameful 40+ days into it (over several years it must be said but it is still shameful). Having played COD since Modern Warfare, I stopped around Black Ops – partly due to other demands on my time, but mostly because the games had moved so far from the sheer fun I had on COD4, that I really no longer enjoyed it. Two years after it came out, I decided to pick up Ghosts.